Graphic Arts and Celtic DNA

Tag Archives: coastline

Snowy Plovers in flight over ocean – These small birds are an endangered species along our northern California coast. They nest and lay eggs on beach sand, which makes them vulnerable to unaware visitors with unleashed dogs, and of course, other predators. Sad. If only folks were aware.

July 4 Fireworks at Point Arena Cove–The grand finale burst! There is a great crescendo of OOHHHs and AAHHHs from the crowds on the rocky beach, and everyone’s spirit soars aloft

Thick fog or cloud banks often cloak the night sky over the northern California Coastal Range. On the evening of the Easter Vigil a rising full moon, with its glowing intensity, managed to burn through the dark ultramarine canvas, leaving only a smudge or blur above the lunar disk.

SEA ANEMONE–a flower-like marine creature with a columnar body and a ring of stinging tentacles around its mouth. Notice the green anemone peeking out at us from its exposed rock lair during a brief hour or two of low ocean tide.

Nothing like a spectacular orange-hued sunrise over the Coast Mountain Range in northern California, looking across from my cabin:

And here are several of my sketches and a painting I think have some interesting, though more subtle, hues of orange. The first at left is a quick, colored sketch of Verocchio’s sculpture of David, which has nice orange ochre hues; the sketch to the right is of a model at a recent life drawing session, and has some interesting orange pastel shading; and the final, bottom painting has white gesso, purple, and a vivid reddish orange design.

Tide Pool creatures live in a world defined by a changing depth of perhaps fifteen or twenty feet, and may have only the dimmest sort of consciousness–that the mother tide shall return with a sustenance and embryonic fluid needed for protection and propagation. We humans live with what is thought to be the highest sense of consciousness, and in a somewhat deeper layer of sustaining gases and nutrients–perhaps reaching to twenty thousand feet. How infinitesimally small both layers are when thinking of a universe that continues to expand in depths measured in billions of light years.

Uncovered Sea Anemones in rock pockets–waiting for the tide to hurry back.

Thinking of our new photo theme, “Shadowed,” it can sometimes prompt a certain sense of apprehension, perhaps in cloaking some object or scene that has drawn our attention. Shadowing is almost like a physical presence as it physically moves with time across our view, dimming or perhaps obliterating color, causing us to almost lose some perception of depth in our field of view.

The first photo of a darkening, rocky coastline is of that sort. The second photo presenting a shaft of sunlight entering a room shows a shadowing effect that dramatizes boundary effects between light and darkness. In extreme light, color becomes washed out, and in extreme shadow any color is cloaked in darkness. Notice how in the transition area between light and darkness, color is at its richest in saturation.

And finally, to remove the solemnity of shadowing discussions, we have a possible crowd pleaser, the charming cat photograph, which few can grumble over (I hope). Here, my cat Tock creeps out of the obscuring shadows to “startle” his House Mate. (Alas, Tock is no longer with me; he disappeared months later I’m sad to say)>